Thursday, March 23, 2017

Thursday as Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he would join with other Democrats in attempting to filibuster the nomination — a move that could complicate his confirmation and lead to a total revamp of how the U.S. Senate conducts its business.

Since last year’s elections, Democrats have threatened to force Trump’s Supreme Court nominees to clear procedural hurdles requiring at least 60 senators to vote to end debate and proceed to a confirmation vote. Republicans are eager to confirm Gorsuch before an Easter recess next month, but with no Democrat expressing support for Gorsuch, they are threatening to change Senate rules to ensure the judge’s swift confirmation by allowing Supreme Court picks to be confirmed with a simple majority vote.

On Thursday, Schumer warned that they should focus instead on changing Trump’s nominee.

“If this nominee cannot earn 60 votes — a bar met by each of President Obama’s nominees, and George Bush’s last two nominees — the answer isn’t to change the rules. It’s to change the nominee,” he said.

It is not clear that Democrats have the votes to block Gorsuch and to keep Republicans from changing the chamber’s way of doing business. But Schumer’s announcement is likely to further politicize an already divided Congress.

Considering what is going on right now with all of these investigations into Trump's ties with Russia I am of the opinion that EVERY nominee that Trump puts forward should be blocked until the investigations are over.

Let's face it every single day we learn of more evidence that this president is compromised by Vladimir Putin and making decisions, including cabinet appointees, that benefit Russia far more than they do America.

I am simply not comfortable with this man putting ANYBODY on the Supreme Court, nor putting his surrogates in positions of power, so long as there is mounting evidence that he is working for the Kremlin.

Essentially I agree with Rep. Ted Lieu of California: “Other than allowing routine governmental functions, there must be a total and complete shutdown of any agenda item being pushed by the Trump Administration. Congress cannot continue regular order and must stop voting on any Trump-backed agenda item until the FBI completes its Trump-Russia collusion investigation.”

And it will go back and forth like this for the rest of our years. Call me a pessimist all you want, but this has been in play for so many years and more than ever do I grieve the hope I had for my grandchildren's lives. They are barely out of thee gate.

"The U.S. Senate on Thursday voted narrowly to repeal regulations requiring internet service providers to do more to protect customers’ privacy than websites like Alphabet Inc’s Google or Facebook Inc .

The vote was along party lines, with 50 Republicans approving the measure and 48 Democrats rejecting it. The two remaining Republicans in the Senate were absent and did not cast a vote.

According to the rules approved by the Federal Communications Commission in October under then-President Barack Obama, internet providers would need to obtain consumer consent before using precise geolocation, financial information, health information, children’s information and web browsing history for advertising and internal marketing.

The vote was a victory for internet providers such as AT&T Inc , Comcast Corp and Verizon Communications Inc , which had strongly opposed the rules.

But Democratic Senator Ed Markey said, “Republicans have just made it easier for American’s sensitive information about their health, finances and families to be used, shared, and sold to the highest bidder without their permission.”

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said consumers would have privacy protections even without the Obama administration internet provider rules."

But not for long. This is the guy that is out to destroy net neutrality.

This is why I don't do Twitter, Facebook, Imgur, Pinterest, Flickr, Instagram, Reddit etc. I may not be able to keep all of my information private, but I can certainly do what I can to minimize my vulnerability.

" Neither of those blue-ribbon investigations—especially the 9/11 Commission, most often cited by Schiff, Pelosi and their colleagues as a model for a Trump-Russia inquiry—offers much hope that an independent commission would accomplish the Democrats’ goals, at least not if those goals include getting to the bottom of this mess in a timely fashion and holding individuals accountable for their wrongdoing." TRUTH OUT!http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/devin-nunes-surveillance-donald-trump-investigation-214946

I support Schumer's actions! Payback is good! All of us remember the constant obstruction suffered by President Obama (via Republicans) throughout his 'entire' two terms as POTUS. All was led by the jerk, McConnell of Kentucky.

They need to "remind" everyone that the republicans "ignored" Obama's choice for a year.

Every time this vote comes up, mention that fact, the Democrats have to stop assuming people will remember all the obstruction done by the republicans for eight years and mention it in every interview.

The Government should be in shutdown right now until these investigations are done.

Trump is incompetent and a traitor. Nothing this important should be decided until he is either cleared or impeached.

Whatever the outcome. If they cant pin it on Trump and only his "circle" he will never be trusted, not by are allies and not by us. It's been nothing but chaos since he got elected. Make America Great Again by dumping this ego driven ass!

Much is made about the expense of his Mar A Lago weekends yet no one mentions the money tRump is making off of it. We are paying for secret service to stay at his "Winter White House". We are paying for secret service to stay at Trump Tower because his own wife the absent First Lady cant stand his ass.Trump is using our tax dollars to make money for himself.

Ivanka gets an office in the White House and Melania sits on her butt like Rapunzel.What happened to her bullying agenda? Liars! Using our tax dollars like Trumps personal piggy bank.

Hey they must confirm Judge Garland first and then we can deny this guy next, this judge had very questionable decisions. He is not a judge for the people. He is a judge for corporations/citizen united. Every person appointed by the ass is a citizen united member. And the Citzen United ruling decision was the biggest crime against Americans in usa history beside allowing a fraud election to happen and placing a dangerous mentally ill liar in oval office.

Republicans would never have accepted Michelle Obama living and paying for her to live somewhere else.They would have been bitching about it to high heaven!

The secret service just asked for 60 million more dollars to cover expenses and were turned down.Hey billoinaire Trump if your wife cant stand you than pay for it yourself. Why should New York pay for your wife? And you want to cut funding for the NYPD! If your third wife would just move into the White House like EVERY First Lady has before her it would be a big relief to New York and the tax payers.

They have good schools in Washington for kids like Barron to ask a real President like Obama for advice.

The Sidwell School, which the last several First Families' kids have attended, is a first-rate school in DC and is set up especially for the secret service to guard the kids with little to no interruption to the school kids' learning experiences during the day, and very little interruption to the surrounding areas' business and traffic. Costs much less to guard the kids there as a result.Barron would never be harmed or kidnapped there. Virtual impossibility. He's a sitting duck wherever Malaria sends him in NYC.

"The White House is seeking to cut $1 billion in funding for U.N. peacekeeping operations and to eliminate hundreds of millions of dollars for other U.N. programs that care for needy children and seek to lift the world’s poorest out of a life of grinding poverty, according to two diplomatic sources briefed on the plan.

The proposal is certain to face strong pushback from Democratic and Republican congressional leaders, who warned that President Donald Trump’s budget will never be passed. But it reflected the White House’s clear desire to jettison America’s traditional role as the champion of the downtrodden and embrace that of a military powerhouse to be feared.

The White House budget office informed State Department officials this week that the administration plans to eliminate all U.S. funding to the $326 million International Organizations and Programs account, which provides more than $130 million to UNICEF — a sizable chunk of the more than $500 million the United States contributed to the U.N. agency in 2016 — and around $70 million to the U.N. Development Programme.

They were also told to brace for a 40 percent cut to the State Department’s U.N. peacekeeping budget. The United States contributed more than $2 billion to the U.N.’s $8 billion-plus peacekeeping budget last year."

Days before his death, Putin critic said in interview he knew he was in danger

KIEV — In the plush, crimson-decked lobby bar of Kiev’s five-star Premier Palace Hotel, Denis Voronenkov, a Russian lawmaker who had defected to Ukraine, knew he was in danger.

“For our personal safety, we can’t let them know where we are,” he said Monday evening as he sat with his wife for an interview with The Washington Post.

Less than 72 hours later, he was dead, shot twice in the head in broad daylight outside the same lobby bar. It was a particularly brazen assassination that recalled the post-Soviet gangland violence of the 1990s. His wife, dressed in black, sobbed as she stooped down to identify Voronenkov’s body, which lay beneath a black tarp in a pool of blood.

President Drumpf, the author of “The Art of the Deal,” has been projecting his usual bravado in public this week about the prospects of repealing the Affordable Care Act. Privately he is grappling with rare bouts of self-doubt.

Mr. Drumpf has told four people close to him that he regrets going along with Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s plan to push a health care overhaul before unveiling a tax cut proposal more politically palatable to Republicans.

He said ruefully this week that he should have done tax reform first when it became clear that the quick-hit health care victory he had hoped for was not going to materialize on Thursday, the seventh anniversary of the act’s passage, when the legislation was scheduled for a vote.

Presidents usually choose their words carefully, the result of personal discipline and careful vetting by White House staff.

President Drumpf is an exception. In an interview with Time magazine, published on Thursday, Mr. Drumpf veers from topic to topic, praising himself and dismissing his critics in language that sometimes is hard to follow.

A few things are clear after the congressional testimony of James Comey, the F.B.I. director, this week:

First, Donald Drumpf owes Barack Obama and the American people an apology for his vituperative lie that Obama committed a felony by wiretapping Drumpf Tower. It was specious, libelous and reckless, regardless of the weak revelations of “incidental collection” that the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and Drumpf transition team member Devin Nunes outrageously made public, briefing the president without first briefing his fellow committee members. Nunes’s announcement was a bombshell with no bomb, just enough mud in the water to obscure the blood in the water for those too willfully blind to discern the difference.

Second, Donald Drumpf will never apologize. Drumpf’s strategy for dealing with being caught in a lie is often to tell a bigger lie. He seems constitutionally incapable of registering what others would: shame, embarrassment, contrition. Something is broken in the man — definitely morally and possibly psychologically.

Third, and to me this is the biggest, Comey confirmed that the investigation into the Drumpf campaign’s ties to the Russians who tampered with our election is not “fake news” manufactured by Democrats stewing over a bitter loss but a legitimate investigation that has been underway for months and has no end in sight.

Individuals who were associated with the president of the United States’ winning campaign are under criminal investigation. That is an extraordinary sentence and one that no American can allow to be swallowed up by other news or dismissed by ideologues.

Continue reading the main story

Charles M. BlowPolitics, public opinion and social justice.Disciples of a False ProphetMAR 16Drumpf and the Parasitic PresidencyMAR 13A Ticket to HellMAR 9Pause This Presidency!MAR 6Drumpf, Archenemy of TruthFEB 27See More »

RECENT COMMENTS

Scott Silver 8 hours agoThank you for this beautifully crafted, well researched article, summarizing Trump's truly deplorable acts.Bravo, Mr Blow.Ms Nina G 8 hours agoThank you for writing this piece.Peter 8 hours agoKeep up this very necessary work, Mr. Blow. While it's awful that this country, indeed the world, has to go through all of this in order to...SEE ALL COMMENTSDepending on the outcome of this investigation, we could be facing a constitutional crisis. Oddly, it is likely that the reason Drumpf is even in the Oval Office is Comey’s original, extraordinarily inappropriate and unprecedented action. The Drumpf machinery then used that action to scare Americans about Clinton, in one of the most astonishing acts of deflection and hypocrisy in American history.

The timeline of how the lie of Clinton’s constitutional crisis was born and grew is full of Machiavellian-level misdirections.

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This blog is dedicated to finding the truth, exposing the lies, and holding our politicians and leaders accountable when they fall far short of the promises that they have made to both my fellow Alaskans and the American people.